Wednesday, April 25, 2007

All You Wanted to Know about Diet Pills

Obesity is one of the most prevalent and common health problems among human beings, and when no amount of exercise and diet control helps, people resort to the scientific solution of diet pills.

You’ve seen them advertised on the web, in magazines, and in infomercials - diet pills, drinks, teas, and bars. The market today is flooded with companies claiming to have magical pills which lead to instant weight reduction with no side effects. These products are known as dietary supplements because they are ingested and contain vitamins, minerals, herbs, other botanicals, amino acids, or substances such as enzymes, organ tissues, and metabolites. Dietary supplements can be tablets, capsules, softgels, gelcaps, liquids, or powders. They can also come in the form of bars, as long as the bar is not labeled as a conventional food or meal replacement.

There are different types of diet pills which work in different ways. For example, 7 Keto is an awesome metabolic enhancing compound that helps to reduce body weight and body fat by giving you more of a hormone that tells your thyroid to increase your metabolism. Then there is Hoodia by itself, not combined with other compounds, which appears to affect the brain by making the stomach feel full and reducing the desire to eat. Diet Pills available over the counter (OTC) contain a combination of medications, usually phenylpropanolamine (PPA) and caffeine, which act to control appetite. Caffeine, also a stimulant, results in increased alertness and decreased drowsiness and fatigue when taken in low doses (50-200 mg). Caffeine also has some weak appetite-suppressant properties.

Multivitamins should also be used as a supplement as they help you maintain the muscle that you have by providing nutrients your cells need. While ephedra has been banned, another supplement of choice has become green tea extract, which is a stimulant of the same nature as ephedra.

However, there's no free lunch with diet pills: They work much better accompanied by the hard work of dieting and exercise. Another thing is maintaining the scale after stopping the intake of pills. Diet drugs, such as Meridia, Xenical and rimonabant, can help shrink waistlines, but keeping that weight off may be the toughest part. Obesity can easily return once individuals quit exercising and eating right, or stop using a weight-loss medication.

Diet pills and other products contain a complicated mixture of vitamins, minerals, herbs or other botanicals, amino acids, or substances like enzymes, organ tissues, and metabolites. The way they work together can determine how they work with your body. And it’s not always a great combination.

Whether they’re natural or manmade, the ingredients in diet pills are, at their most basic level, chemicals. And that means that they can react with your own body chemistry, with medications you may be taking – including birth control -- or with other things that you ingest – in a way that you can’t predict.

Also remember that most diet pills are NOT FDA approved and it is definitely a situation of buyer beware. Heart palpitation and racing can occur and in many cases if overused death is a possibility. As always, the best person to talk to is a nutritionist